With all the demonstrations last month that protested police brutality, the topic has come up quite a bit. I’ve found myself remembering a horrible experience I had when I was about fourteen.

It was payday, and our regular payday splurge was a six-pack of Coke and a box of greasy fried chicken and jo-joes. Mom and I were leaving Pache, the Native American HUD housing project where we lived, about to turn onto the road that led to Ronan, when twenty little kids chased a horse in front of us and into the road.

Eloise, my mom, stopped the truck and rummaged behind the seat for some rope, put the emergency flashers on and proceeded to handle the situation. In moments she had the horse in a make-shift halter and was leading her toward a gate, surrounded by a cloud of adoring kids. The gate was on the other side of a patch of pine trees. The horse was put in a neighboring farmer’s field as a stop-gap measure.

I waited in the truck, happily listening to the radio and eating my dinner. The flashers made their lop-sided clink-clank . . . clink-clank . . . noise.

A white Ronan City Police car glided past, then came back and parked behind the truck. The policeman got out and came over to the passenger window and asked me what was going on. I happily told him about the horse. The athletic white officer made a face that meant, “Yea right, I don’t believe you”. Police cars started showing up, within minutes seven or eight of them were there. I told them who I was, who my mom was. They had me get out of the car, and surrounded me. They accused me of stealing the truck. They acted like nothing that I said was the truth, and I felt like they were trying to provoke me. It would have worked with a typical Pache girl. Many of the women from the reservation are passionate and confrontational in personality. 

My mom must have felt like screaming when she started to walk back to the truck and saw it surrounded by “town-clowns.” She didn’t come out of the pines, but turned around and got Wayne, our neighbor’s white boyfriend. Wayne was a tall man, and he walked with long strides that covered the distance to the truck quickly.

The minutes of being circled by intimidating, harassing men seemed like an eternity. I have always been nearly impossible to provoke, but I would have started crying if it had gone on much longer. 

“I’ve come to get the truck.” Wayne said to the policemen. “Paula, get in,” he said to me as he got into the driver’s seat. I obeyed. He turned the truck around and drove back to our house. The police didn’t stop us. Warm floods of relief washed over me.

My aunt has deep scars that circle her arms just below her elbows, from an incident where she got drunk while playing volleyball, circumstances escalated to a point where she was hand-cuffed and abused. I grew up hearing about the rape, plundering and poaching exploits of the white cops. I spent an evening talking to an ex-Juarrez policeman once, and there wasn’t much of a difference in how he described the Mexican police force and how some of the “protectors of the peace” on the reservation behave.

About six months ago, Donald Bell was elected Lake County Sheriff. I was very happy for him, not just because he is a cousin of my mom’s and wore an arrowhead shaped badge like my grandpa had, but because he represents so many different people on the reservation. He was a tribal policeman, and is a tribal member, but he is a tall blue-eyed white man, by appearance, who relates well with the white-world. He is also a Mormon, and in general I don’t have a high opinion of Mormons, but there is a large community of Mormons on the reservation, and I’m glad that they are represented by a good man.

Oh, and the poor horse that was out belonged to our neighbor, a man who had bought her while he was drunk, and had nowhere to keep her, so he put her in the backyard with the dogs. All that was sorted out, and a new home was found for her, she was fine.